With Queer (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), director Luca Guadagnino takes a bold artistic step in attempting to adapt a William S. Burroughs novel. It’s not impossible – David Cronenberg did it! Pretty well, actually! – but it also ain’t easy, considering the idiosyncratic distinction of the source material. Read: Not anybody can translate hard-drug-influenced surrealism to film. Queer might not exist without the participation of its superstar lead, Daniel Craig, who makes the endeavor a slightly less difficult sell to audiences, playing Burroughs stand-in William Lee as he gets drunk and high and gets into adventures in Mexico City and South America, he said, knowing full well he’s using gross understatement. The film was Guadagnino’s second release of 2024 after the masterful Challengers, which casts a long shadow from which Queer never quite emerges. But is it worth a look anyway?
QUEER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: William Lee (Craig) seems so incredibly horny. Or lonely. Actually, the two kind of go hand-in-hand, it seems. One assumes he’s in Mexico City to write – we get one shot of his typewriter, maybe 45 minutes into the film – because we know he is to Burroughs what Henry Chinaski was to Charles Bukowski. But a lot like Chinaski/Bukowski, the main thing he seems to do is drink and smoke cigarette after cigarette and chase tail. He hangs out at the diner-slash-bar Ship Ahoy, which one assumes is in a liberal pocket of the city, since it’s 1955 and there’s really no side-eyeing (or worse) of the gay men who drink there. There’s Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman in husky-guy prosthetics), who’s always sweating even more than everyone in this movie’s version of Mexico City always seems to be sweating (sweat: a major Guadagnino motif, especially in 2024), and the more flamboyant John Dume (Drew Droege), but they’re not Lee’s type, possibly because they’re available and possibly as desperate as he is. Meanwhile, what’s happening outside on the streets? Cockfights, of course.
But then into this juke joint walks this fella, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, Outer Banks star). I don’t know if “smitten” is the right word but it’ll do for now. Lee’s initial overture is an embarrassment but everyone gets over it and eventually the two sit down for some skewered meat in between drags on cigarettes and shots of tequila. Allerton is 20, maybe 30 years his younger, and an ex-GI with a girlfriend, but he seems almost sort of possibly open to being with other men? He’s not exactly an open book. In fact, his diary is padlocked and armor-plated and I don’t think Lee could pull out his omnipresent holstered revolver and penetrate it with a bullet. That’s a problem for Lee and also possibly for this movie – maybe at least a little bit – but it might help if Lee seemed capable of open and honest communication, although that might taint his tragico-romantico persona, a death knell for a tortured-ass writer.
Did I mention Lee is addicted to heroin? Well, Lee is addicted to heroin. Drugs are his thing. The powdered kind, the pill kind, the kind you heat up in a spoon and inject into your vein. Alcohol too. And cigarettes! As I previously mentioned. Allerton plays hard to get, but also easy to get when Lee charms him. I don’t know if “charms” is the right word but it’ll do for now. WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS GUY. He may not be the title of the movie at all! Coincidentally, Lee catches wind of a drug called yagé, which can be found in the South American jungle and supposedly can render the user telepathic. This, obviously, is the only way he’ll be able to figure out what Allerton is thinking and feeling. Obviously! Lee proposes to Allerton that they trek to Ecuador on Lee’s dime (where does he get his money?) to find the drug, and Allerton agrees, almost to the point where he isn’t shrugging indifferently. I think this is progress? Anyway – the things we’ll do for love, right?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I have a distinct memory of seeing Naked Lunch with three high school buddies, two of whom were not on the Burroughs/Cronenberg wavelength, one of whom spontaneously stood up in the middle of the movie to wordlessly express his state of flabbergastedness. I also can’t help but think about how another great modern auteur, Yorgos Lanthimos, released Poor Things and by the time Kinds of Kindness debuted a handful of months later, we were a little bit Lanthimosed out.
Performance Worth Watching: Don’t be surprised if respect for Craig’s wily, charismatic and subtle performance, where he manages to express the trademark Burroughs madness while simultaneously laying bare Lee’s desire to be loved, grows over time. Loved by this one specific object of obsession, mind you, but loved nonetheless.
Memorable Dialogue: “I’m not queer. I’m disembodied.”
Sex and Skin: Male and female full frontal; lots of gay men going to town.
Our Take: Part of me believes Queer to be the tragic story of a man’s malfunctioning gaydar, or at least his ability to deny its insights and lead with his loins. But as the final galvanizing scenes reassure us, the film is about love, which knows no logic. It’s easy to link this strange, sometimes hypnotizing saga with Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, which also explored the temporary nature of lust and deeper things, in a similarly sweaty, erotic manner. The director’s breakout calling-card film expresses greater intimacy and therefore cuts a more direct path to our hearts, but neither does it feature otherworldly dream sequences or omigod that’s Lesley Manville moments that are right at home in a Burroughs adaptation. Manville turns up in the final act as the scientist in the jungle with the yagé, which she uses to make ayahuasca, and not to be too on the nose, but her grimy visage and crazylady mannerisms are a trip.
Visually, Guadagnino renders Queer pointedly manufactured, filming almost entirely on backlots with digital backdrops. Artifice is the point, reflecting the unreliable narrators of Burroughs’ prose. Layered atop that is a killer anachronistic score by Guadagnino mainstays Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and an equally rousing soundtrack featuring the likes of Nirvana, Prince and Sinead O’Connor covering Nirvana – “All Apologies” and “Come as You Are” are notably affecting on both thematic and stylistic fronts.
Whether the film’s variously brilliant pieces come together with any kind of coherent subtextual artistic statement is the question. It’s romance-as-mystery, bizarrely funny in spurts and bereft of any familiar dramatic arcs. It may be better to view Queer as a showcase for Craig, who occasionally goes big and dips into Burroughs’ tainted-honey drawl, but mostly plays Lee quite raw, an aimless, stunted man whose unspoken demons – outside a brief acknowledgment that he should stop doing opiates, knowing full well he won’t – are a barricade to his happiness. It’s a hell of a performance, and it meshes sublimely with Guadagnino’s ability to capture a bit of gonzo beat-gen tone, mixing arch visual sensibilities with his trademark earnest explorations of love, love in this case being the blossom of a plant with roots that’ll make your skin melt and your eyes see through the cosmos.
Our Call: No Burroughs adaptation done right will fail to challenge us – and Queer does that, absolutely. But Craig draws us in and makes it very hard for us to leave. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
